Srishti Paruthi
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Business tycoon Ratan Tata has opened up about his personal life, he further extends gratitude to his grandmother for teaching him to retain his dignity at all costs. “I had a happy childhood, but as my brother & I got older, we faced a fair bit of ragging & personal discomfort because of our parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common. But my grandmother brought us up in every way.”
His parents Naval Tata and Sooni, got separated when he was young. In a ‘Humans Of Bombay’ post, he further reveals, “Soon after when my mother remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about us — constantly and aggressively. But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s stayed with me until today. It involved walking away from these situations, which otherwise we would have fought back against.”
Ratan Tata further talked about the differences he had with his father. “I wanted to learn to play the violin, my father insisted on the piano. I wanted to go to college in the US, he insisted on the UK. I wanted to be an architect, he insisted on me becoming an engineer. If it weren’t for my grandmother, I wouldn’t have ended up at Cornell University in the US.”
But at the same time I had made the decision to move back at least temporarily since I had been away from my grandmother who wasn’t keeping too well for almost 7 years. So I came back to visit her and thought that the person I wanted to marry would come to India with me, but because of the 1962 Indo-China war her parent’s weren’t okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart.
Further on his love life, Ratan Tata shares how he ‘almost got married’ right after college. “After college, I landed a job at an architecture firm in LA, where I worked for two years. It was a great time — the weather was beautiful, I had my own car and I loved my job. It was in LA that I fell in love and almost got married.”
